KJD wrote:The main problem with CHAdeMO chargers is that they are broken most of the time. There are probably 8 or 10 of them here in Utah and as of today I think there is exactly one that works right now. All of these units have had multiple problems and Nissan does nothing to fix them. ABB does nothing to fix them. The Nissan sales people are as frustrated as I am on this.

How many CHAdeMO chargers are open 24x7 ? Not very many.

Nissan has some work to do if they ever want to expand the EV market beyond niche status.

A LEAF with 180 mile range might help people forget how bad the charging stations are.

I couldn't agree more with everything you said. I have never been able to use chademo because it was either broken or there was a line of cars waiting to use it. The other problem is the uninformed (95%) trying to charge to 100% on chademo.

I really, really hope for a 160+ mile Leaf. I'm fairly certain the Tesla will be at least $12k more with supercharging enabled, which is more than I want to spend.

For an "in town car" (less than 40 miles before returning home) the current Leaf does fine.

As a commuter car in a metro area, it's pretty good, especially if you can charge at work. Even if you can't, 60 mile RT is pretty manage-able. An incremental increase from a 24KW to 30KW would solve the needs of those on the margin.

As an inter-city car...There needs to be a big step forward, but I am not sure it all needs to be based on a bigger battery.

I think the first thing you need to set is what average travel speed over ground combining driving and charging time. There are several factors that go into that including:

Max charge rate in of the battery at different levels of chargeEfficiency of the car at different speedsCapacity of the batterySpacing of charging stations on the highwayTime used starting and stopping a charging session.

Suppose you want to average 50 MPH average, could travel at 60 MPH at 20 KW/hr and charge at 96 KW/hr.

Averaging 50 MPH could be 5 hours at 60 MPH followed by an hour of charging. Or that could be 50 minutes at 60 MPH followed by 10 minutes of charging. One requires a much bigger battery. The other requires more infrastructure. I would argue that it is better to improve the infrastructure that would be used 100% of the time by the people doing inter-city travel, than to sink money into bigger batteries that will be used 10% of the time when you do that occasional inter-city trip.

There are pros and cons on larger batteries. True, for the 90% of the time you are not intercity, the number of cycles your battery will go through will be smaller with a larger battery so the degradation should be less. On the other hand, you pay for that in cost and weight and less efficiency. For any designer, the range of choices is different in 2009 vs 2014 vs 2019. Really big batteries (60-100KW) may make sense now, but will they make sense of if plentiful quick charging stations are spaced every 50 miles on the highway? I am thinking that around 36KW might be the sweet spot once the infrastructure improves.

evnow wrote:The comparison between chademo & superchargers is similar to that between Android and Apple ecosystem. The only way chademo overcomes inherent disadvantages of a multi-owner uncoordinated layout is by overwhelming superchargers in terms of distribution and numbers. The reliability would be built on large numbers - rather than centrally managed.

Except that there aren't large numbers of Chademo chargers in most places and the places needed for real interstate travel tend to have few or none. And why would anyone put hundreds of Chademo chargers out in the boondocks, to enable long distance travel, using the current model of installation? Who is going to pay for it?

The Chademo network in coastal Washington and Oregon is NOT representative of the country as a whole. And there is a whole lot of empty space to cover once one gets beyond densely populated areas, such as the east and west coasts. Again, who is going to pay for a hodge-podge network of Chademo stations to cover such places?

I just don't understand how the Chademo model can be compared to Tesla's deliberately designed Supercharger network. I don't get it.

Last edited by dgpcolorado on Sun Dec 14, 2014 11:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

KJD wrote:The main problem with CHAdeMO chargers is that they are broken most of the time. There are probably 8 or 10 of them here in Utah and as of today I think there is exactly one that works right now. All of these units have had multiple problems and Nissan does nothing to fix them. ABB does nothing to fix them. The Nissan sales people are as frustrated as I am on this.

How many CHAdeMO chargers are open 24x7 ? Not very many.

Nissan has some work to do if they ever want to expand the EV market beyond niche status.

A LEAF with 180 mile range might help people forget how bad the charging stations are.

And where I live there are no Chademo chargers. Zero. Zip. None. The nearest one is 300 miles away. There is no way I could drive a 160 mile range LEAF to Salt Lake City, never mind California or Oregon. And I don't see that changing for the foreseeable future. But I could make trips like that in a Tesla today.

The Tesla Model III will almost certainly be more expensive than LEAF 2, but you get what you pay for. If one wants a city or regional car, LEAF 2 with double the range of LEAF 1 would be fine. If you want one BEV that can handle long distance trips in addition to local travel then Tesla is the only current option. Otherwise it's back to burning oil to get around, something I am trying to avoid. Others don't give a damn. So be it.

dgpcolorado wrote:I just don't understand how the Chademo model can be compared to Tesla's deliberately designed Supercharger network. I don't get it.

I think the comparison is apt. I don't think you can really compare hardware standards and software standards like that. Chademo requires significant capital resources, both for the initial build and the ongoing maintenance. The question is "what is the incentive?" There is a huge market for smartphones, and lower cost for Android is one reason that it got a lead on Windows Mobile early on. Now that MS has made Windows free on small devices, compatibility helps Android to maintain the lead. Tesla has an incentive to build out and maintain superchargers because they want to sell cars. Until a Chademo-enabled manufacturer has that same drive, Superchargers will have the lead. If another EV manufacturer made a long-range EV, they'd have to give some serious consideration to quick charging. As it stands, the other manufacturers makes city cars, and DC charging is just not going to be a priority in a city car.

I've been wondering how a charger can be down at a Nissan dealer when the expertise to maintain and repair cars is (presumably there.) With all the car electronics and other subsystems how can a charger be more complex and difficult to maintain? Must be more to this. Whatever is wrong needs to be fixed as it sticks out like a sore thumb to us Leaf owners.

Turnover wrote:I've been wondering how a charger can be down at a Nissan dealer when the expertise to maintain and repair cars is (presumably there.) With all the car electronics and other subsystems how can a charger be more complex and difficult to maintain? Must be more to this. Whatever is wrong needs to be fixed as it sticks out like a sore thumb to us Leaf owners.

Do the dealers own the equipment outright, or do they participate in some sort of charging network? In my experience, having entities share responsibility means the same as having no one be responsible. Since there are no long-range Chademo-compliant cars around, the usage rate on these things is too low to recover the investment. "Having one" on the books might be worthwhile due to some sort of deals with government or Corporate HQ, but having actually working ones probably does not help sell any vehicles, nor does it generate enough hourly fees to keep them up.

dgpcolorado wrote:Except that there aren't large numbers of Chademo chargers in most places ...

Right. The way Chademo can compete with superchargers is building reliability through numbers and overwhelming it with ubiquity. Definitely not there right now (even in PNW). Chademo needs to be almost as numerous as gas stations.

BTW, superchargers can hardly handle 500k cars a year - as they are now.

Rebel44 wrote:Nice, but without something like Tesla Supercharger network, not good enough.

Seriously, LEAF has already been "good enough" for over 100,000 buyers. I think one with double the range would find a decent reception. As far as ChaDeMo, there is provision for higher charge rates. It just hasn't been needed yet.